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OPEN SEASON (2006) Boog, a domesticated 900lb. Grizzly bear, finds himself stranded in the woods 3 days before Open Season. Forced to rely on Elliot, a fast-talking mule deer, the two form an unlikely friendship and must quickly rally other forest animals if they are to form a rag-tag army against the hunters. Trivia Sony Pictures Animation's first theatrical movie. The Sony Animation technicians developed a new tool called Shapers that permitted the animators to reshape the character models, allowing for stronger poses and silhouettes and subtle distortions (squash and stretch, smears, et cetera) typical of traditional, hand-drawn animation. Columbia Pictures' third computer animated movie, after Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001) and Το τερατόσπιτο (2006). Even though this movie was a success, the sequels were not released theatrically since Columbia Pictures wouldn't let Sony Animation release any sequels theatrically until they purchased and acquired Sony Animation in 2010. This is the first Sony Pictures Animation movie to become a franchise. They used BodyPaint 3D of C4D R10 for texturing everything in the movie More info: https://www.maxon.net/ko/article/sony-pictures-animations-open-season-paves-a-new-way-for-imageworks-paint-artists-to-work-together A list of movies that have used in some extend C4D https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_4D#Use_in_industry

About the movie: Genre : SciFi, Drama Synopsis: A complex saga of humans scattered on planets throughout the galaxy all living under the rule of the Galactic Empire. Far in the future, The Empire is about to face a reckoning unlike anything else it's faced before: several Millenia of chaos has been predicted by the galaxy's leading psycho-historian: Hari Seldon. But can The Empire offset the disaster before it begins? Top Cast: Lou Llobell as Gaal Dornick Jared Harris as Hari Seldon Lee Pace as Brother Day Leah Harvey as Salvor Hardin Sasha Behar as Mari Laura Birn as Demerzel Terrence Mann as Brother Dusk Trivia: In the original Foundation Trilogy's universe, and also the immediate sequel Foundation's Edge, robots were unknown. In three subsequent novels, Asimov retconned this and merged his Robot and Foundation universes. This in turn allowed robots to appear in two Foundation prequels written by Asimov. The presence of a robotic character in the series tells us that this adaptation is not simply based the original trilogy, but the unified Universe created by Asimov. VFX: An additional 19 vendors had to be brought in to support DNEG, Important Looking Pirates and Outpost VFX as the visual effects shots for the ten episodes of Season 1 went from 1,500 to 3,900. “I realised early on that we needed a second visual effects supervisor because there was such an overlap between physical production and post-production, and the different time zones,” explains Kathy Chasen-Hay, senior VP VFX, Skydance. Each set was designed in three dimensions under the direction of production designer Rory Cheyne. “We then had to reverse engineer those models to turn them into something which was buildable by guys in a workshop,” states Conor Dennison, who was a supervising art director along with William Cheng and Adorjan Portik. “We set up Unreal Engine and a whole VR department within the art department. We would literally give David Goyer, the directors, producers and executives from Apple a set of VR goggles and say, ‘Off you go. Walk around the set. See what you think.’ It was fully lit and textured.” Rhinoceros 3D became the design software of choice. “The learning curve was stiffer but what you could do with the models afterwards was phenomenal.” Art: The intro of each episode is very impressive featuring elements and concepts of the movie in the form of a future painting medium that resembles a glitter fero-fluid. Displaying the history of the Empire in the Imperial Palace is the Mural of Souls, which is made of moving colour pigments. “We tried an interesting approach which was putting a bunch of acrylic ink in a pan, using Ferrofluid and running a magnet underneath it; that was filmed at a high speed which gave us a cool look, but it would have been impractical to have the mural wet all of the time,” notes MacLean. “Then we came up with the samsara where the Tibetan monks make mandala out of sand and wipe it away. We said, ‘What if we take that and turn it up to 11. Take the magnets from the Ferrofluid and have the sand be magnetic. The magnetic sand stays on the wall, twirls and makes these crazy images.” Simulations were placed on top of the physical mural created by the art department. “There was depth given to the various key features on the mural so depending on what was actually there, there was a custom particle layout, motion paths and noise fields,” explains Enriquez. “It was a lot of back-and-forth testing, and once we got it to work, the effect went throughout the entire shot. Kudos to Mackevision for getting that going.” Scar of Trator: In the first episode there is a terrorist attack on the largest space hub of the planet which connects with the planet through a huge elevator pillar like an umbilical cord. The destruction of the space hub results in a huge collapse of the pillar resulting in the death of millions. In order to have more control over the devastation caused by suicide bombers, Rodeo FX was recruited to produce a CG version. “Trantor is basically a city like Shanghai or Hong Kong in its architectural density, but that spreads over the full planet surface, then layered in depth of about 200 city levels of approximately the same urban density,” explains Arnaud Brisebois, VFX supervisor, Rodeo FX. “The task was to basically tear a giant gash in it. We would get a collection of building builds from DNEG. For each of those buildings, we generated five destruction variants, from barely wounded to completely collapsed. We generated shading attributes through FX’s destroyed areas which would be picked up in look development to give various areas of each building’s destruction its own age, or effect from destruction either partial or full. We built a megafloors [city levels] collection the same way. We spent a lot of time and effort working on single assets, making them highly detailed. You could drop a camera anywhere, near or far and it would still look awesome. I remember David Goyer’s comments coming in after seeing our early assemblies of the shots. ‘That's AWESOME! Like a spaceship Hindenburg!’ It’s the type of tone we’d get from David. Always excited, positive and fun to read.” The Conjecture: The device known as the Prime Radiant displays lifework of revolutionary mathematician Hari Seldon (Jared Harris). “What I kept saying to Chris and the team was, ‘We know that Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick [Lou Llobell] are the only people that can understand this math, but we’re so far into the future I don’t want to see Arabic numbers,” remarks Goyer. “I also want it to be beautiful and spiritual. When Gaal and Hari look at the math it’s almost like they are communicating with angels or God.” The solution was found at the Toronto-based design house Tendril. “We went to Chris Bahry who in his spare time does quantum math,” states Chris MacLean, production VFX supervisor. “He came up with something that I hope becomes the ultimate sci-fi MacGuffin.” Holograms take the form of ‘Sandograms’. “The majority of our holograms are meant to be solid particles that coalesce into whatever the hologram was,” notes MacLean. “It worked extremely well with static objects and a 2.5D approach that Mike developed with DNEG.” Michael Enriquez, production VFX supervisor, adds, “I liked the concept of it not emitting light and being a physical object in the scene. The technology is so advanced that you don’t need an explanation for why it works.” The Monolith: Prominent on the surface of Terminus is a mysterious artifact that has a presence similar to that of the black monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey. “Rory and I were like, ‘It has to be like Arrival’,” states MacLean. “It has to be this simple thing. I started to get into divine geometry and drew a simple diamond with a bit of a facet on it and mirrored it. I sent it to DNEG and they sent it back to us as a concept with this glowing centre. Rupert Sanders, the pilot director, got his designer Ash Thorp to do the same kind of thing. We sent it to Matt Cherniss at Apple to decide and he liked the diamond shape.” Even though the final design was decided in post-production, a partial practical element was constructed for principal photography. “We built the bottom six feet which was a little wedge shape with a light feature coming out of it; that was hanging off of a crane up in Iceland on the top of a mountain,” reveals Dennison. “Visual effects needed to have the effect of light for when Salvor Hardin [Leah Harvey] got up close to the Vault. The light naturally lit her up. Everything else was visual effects afterwards.” What's next ? If everything goes to plan for Goyer, Foundation will span 80 episodes over eight seasons. In order to do this, a number of narrative gaps had to be conceptualised. “The ‘Sack of Trantor’ is mentioned in the novels. But for a television show, audiences also want a certain amount of spectacle. We had to find a balance between visualising some of these events and staying rooted in story and character. Source: 3DWorld, Issue 279 Outposts' VFX Breakdown Personal notes: The series is kinda slow but interesting. The first episode is the one with the most heavy VFX scenes. Foundation reminds me of Dune, both of them have a luck of A.I. androids, many episodes involve the events unravelling in Terminus which is an arid planet like Dune and both plots involve characters of imperial heritage. Alien life is not too prevalent. We have the chance to witness some alien lifeforms but very briefly.

AMD has released Radeon ProRender 3.3 for Blender and Radeon ProRender 3.3 for Maya, the latest versions of the Blender and Maya editions of its free, physically accurate GPU renderer. Better support for rendering volumes, plus DeepEXR export for Maya users Both versions get support for rendering environment fog and heterogeneous volumes like clouds and smoke in Full quality mode, although not yet on macOS. The Blender edition supports Blender’s Volume Scatter node and Principled Volume shader. In addition, the Maya edition can now export Deep EXR files for use in VFX compositing workflows. Availability and system requirements All the editions of Radeon ProRender are free downloads. The source code of the plugins is available under the Apache Licence 2.0. Radeon ProRender 3.3 for Blender is compatible with Blender 2.80+ on Windows, Linux and macOS. Radeon ProRender 3.3 for Maya is compatible with Maya 2018+ on Windows and macOS. https://www.amd.com/en/technologies/radeon-prorender full list of new features in Radeon ProRender 3.3 for Blender Version 3.3 New Features: Support for Fog and Heterogenous Volume rendering has been added to the RPR Full mode. Simulated volumes are now rendered on CPU and GPU. This includes support for the Blender Volume Scatter node and Principled Volume shader. Fixes: An output socket has been added in the Render Layer compositor node for Outline renders. An issue that could cause Material Previews not to work has been fixed. An error when Shadow Catcher objects were enabled with viewport rendering has been corrected. The following issues with Image Sequence texture not working have been fixed: Viewport and Final renders using texture sequences now look correct; Cyclic and Auto Refresh options in the image texture now work correctly; Support for numeric image filenames has been added. Hide/unhide could sometimes not work correctly with viewport rendering — fixed. Viewport upscaling now always uses 16-bit depth, which has fixed an issue with upscaling working on macOS. Emission Strength values > 1.0 now work correctly in the Principled Shader. Motion blur now works correctly with the “Center on Frame” and “Frame End” options. Setting the minimum samples option from 1 to 16 is now allowed (default is still 64). Hair rendering fixes: Hair UVs now work correctly; Textures are now supported for the color input of the Principled Hair BSDF and Hair BSDF; The color and melanin settings of the Principled Hair BSDF now look more accurate. Particle objects with hair on them were not rendering the hair — fixed. An issue with the “World” light being empty has been fixed. An AOV output “Camera Space Normal” has been added. Exporting .rpr files now takes into account material overrides. A warning is now added when an object with an excessive number of faces is exported. When a shader node was “muted,” that was not working in some cases — fixed. Differences in point lights between Cycles and ProRender have been mitigated. The Albedo AOV now passes the “Base color” on the Toon shader. A halo no longer appears around shadow and reflection catcher objects. AOVs passed through transparent or refractive materials — fixed. Noise convergence with emissive materials using textures has been improved. Performance with outline rendering has been improved. Performance regression on WX7100 GPUs has been fixed. The Object ID Lookup node now works in the Full mode. Objects with Toon shaders attached now cast shadows correctly if the flag is disabled. An issue detected on the latest NVidia drivers has been fixed. Known Issues: Volumes are not implemented on macOS. Vega GPUs with AMD 21.10 drivers can cause an issue when using the ML Denoiser. full list of new features in Radeon ProRender 3.3 for Maya Version 3.3 New Features: Support for Fog and Heterogenous Volume rendering has been added to the RPR Full mode. Simulated volumes are now rendered on CPU and GPU. An option of exporting DeepEXR files for compositing has been added. DeepEXR files contain multiple depth samples, allowing compositing better with depth. Support for the Voronoi Texture node has been added. Fixes: The texture cache location is now saved between sessions. Scenes that have many instances could crash IPR — fixed. A crash could happen with a correct HDRI image on an environment light — fixed. Support for Object ID and Random Color lookups in shader nodes has been added. After a critical render error, users could not render again without restarting Maya — fixed. Optimizations to the export of objects with deformation motion blur have been made. An error with references to materials in another scene has been fixed. The Albedo AOV now passes the “Base color” on the Toon shader. A halo no longer appears around shadow and reflection catcher objects. AOVs passed through transparent or refractive materials — fixed. Better noise convergence with emissive materials using textures has been achieved. Performance with outline rendering has been improved. Performance degradation on WX7100 GPUs has been eliminated. The Object ID Lookup node now works in the Full mode. Objects with Toon shaders attached now cast shadows correctly if the flag is disabled. An issue detected on the latest NVidia drivers has been fixed. Known Issues: Volumes are not implemented on macOS. Vega GPUs with AMD 21.10 drivers can cause an issue when using the ML Denoiser.

So apparently the StarTrek - Discovery Season 4 has started and I am very excited about it. I used to hate StarTrek and love StarWars but my feelings changed after Disney bought LucasFilms (except The Mandalorian). My feeling towards StarTrek changed after the last 3 movies. StarTrek - Discovery begun in Season 1 somewhat at the same concept as the previous series but had superior CG. As the story progressed the scenario became more and more appealing. I like series that start a bit slow and predictive but show future potential. StarTrek - Discovery is now out of control with a re-imagined futuristic StarFleet closer to other contemporary SciFi futuristic concepts. I like the Intro sequence Spin-offs tailored for each Season and sometimes for special episodes. The intro mimics wireframe renders and FUI. For a TV show, the complexity of many scenes is just incredible. At the end of Season 2 there is a huge battle spanning in two episodes. The amount of particles, explosion's and spacecrafts made the quality look parallel to the last battle of The Rise of Skywalker. Below you will find some VFX breakdowns from all seasons And here's a time-lapse setting the control bridge stage

e-on software has Black Friday deals Get 45% off on all annual licenses of VUE & PlantFactory and PlantCatalog* You can purchase multiple licenses (one year per each license) and activate them later when you need them**. Annual licenses can be installed on two distinct machines and you will get all updates which are released while your license is valid. Please note this is a time-limited offer. It will expire on December 6th, 2021. * Educational products and monthly solutions are not included. ** The runtime of your annual license starts on the first day of activation and not on the day of purchase, so you can activate each license just when you need it.

That's what I meant with "accumulative" price. If RS = 1$ and C4D = 3$ the accumulative prise is 1+3. I think analyzing exactly how the prise could be distributed among Modules could discourage the voter from actually voting. And I'd definitely be unrealistic if I were to put prise tags over every Module. Actually it depends on the features themselves. I've been suggesting features and improvements for years, some where introduced on the next release, others 5 years later and others actually managed to be squeezed at the last moment But the "whishlist" mentioned in the Survey wasn't meant to be taken literally... but as a general improvement frame to stimulate the voter with the right amount of "positive weight" to compensate for the specific drawbacks. Weighting the cons and pros is subjective and I want to reveal the general public bias. The Survey is meant to be speculative and somehow "unrealistic" to reveal "unpredictable" actions

Paul Babb announced that Redshift will be included in the Render Network, Otoy's Render Farm providing a one-click solution.

follow your heart

I have no Idea ! It automatically converted the whole text to uppercase. On top of that, the system wouldn't let me post the poll without filling the Content form which is not in the Poll mode... my "What do you think?" reply was the txt I chose to put...

Maxtree has made 90 of its 3D plant models available to download for free. The free Plant Models Vol 60 collection comprises 15 temperate and semiarid plant species, including broad-leaved trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants and grasses. The high-poly assets, which include files that have previously been available as free samples for Maxtree’s commercial plant collections, are provided in formats suitable for use in most DCC applications. The models come with albedo, glossiness, normal, opacity and translucency maps at up to 4,096 x 4,096px. System requirements and licensing The Plant Models Vol 60 assets are provided as Blender, Cinema 4D and 3ds Max files, and in FBX format. 3ds Max users can also download the plants in a format editable inside Exlevel’s GrowFX plugin. The files are licensed for commercial use. (Requires registering for a Maxtree account) I really want this collection but the subscription asks too many personal info and I don't need another newsletter spam source. https://maxtree.org/products/plant-models-vol-60/

I meant any available purchase practise (either rental or perpetual). I didn't know it was certain that everyone having R25 was getting S26. Anyway, someone from the developing team replying to my question "will the next release be an S or R?" said that he is neither confirming or denying an S release this spring. So by "S26" I refer to the next version upgrade of C4D whatever that is. I'd prefer to leave the post unedited since I don't know if that will reset the voting. For me all these practises like SaaS (Software as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) just because they get murky and ubiquitous, I prefer to nullify them with the phrase "the right to use (the software) under a specific way, time period and place". I didn't want to target any past or current releases. I also assumed that the answer to some of these is obvious and there is no point for a poll for it. So I targeted the future with an optimistic speculation to draw positive conclusions. Still not a useful question. The outcome of polling that question won't change anything. The trust of Maxon's clients doesn't have the power to determine how the next Release will be designed (that is determined from the sales) and what S26 will contain and look like has already been planed, the only thing that can make a difference between the plan and the actual release is the time given to the developers to implement the planed features. A release can be influenced by your first question and when asked early enough for the developing team to have the time to re-schedule everything to accommodate the desired changes. Anyway, I designed the questions in such a way (advantages and drawbacks) to see where people are drawn most towards to (if they will overlook any disadvantages in favor of the advantages or the opposite). These questions have no obvious crowd preference and that's what makes the poll interesting. Asking questions like those you proposed seemed to me like an obvious final result given the fact that there are threads here where many people have expressed their opinion for R25. My goal is not to see how people feel about C4D so far, but what decisions they are more likely to make in the future given a specific set of advantages and disadvantages. And so far the reactions are interesting. The most interesting one is that more than 60 people saw the poll but less than 10 voted 🤔... Usually people get discouraged by the big number of questions...

The FieldForce uses a noise to do just that. The only reason I use TP is because the classic particle Emitter won't spawn particles in a general volume area, doing that the particles remain relatively close to the emitter and not all over the noise Field.

What do you think ?

Magix, Ashampoo and Affinity suite has interesting discounts. Ashampoo has some small video editing apps Magix has MusicMaker (irrelevant but I like it) and some video editing/compositing software. Affinity has the well known Designer, Photo and Publisher. These are cool and cheap apps for anyone who wants to composite renders from C4D or use 2D vector designs to import in C4D. (still looking for laptop so don't leave out hardware related deals 😉)

If you mean doing this : It's possible. BUT the fewer the polygons the better. Using it with two curved surfaces is too bugged . Use the hidden "I" selection inside the Bevel Deformer. For more complicated shapes I prefer using the Volume Builder inside a Remesh.

I am trying to make some particles move as if they are floating under tranquil water. So i want them to move in a way that is not random per particle but essentially the force will move them in a way that some will move close to each other and back to their original position forming dense and sparse areas. This kind of movement is usually seen on the surface of the water where many objects are floating and slightly move by the waves. But I want to see it in 3D rather in 2D. So I made the below Xpresso rig and plugged a FieldForce in the PForceObject. I also posistioned a Sphere at the center of the FieldForce in order to spawn my random particles. The particles themselves have no velocity, I want them to be moved only by the VectorField of the FieldForce. The problem is that the PVolumePosition and PSurfacePosition Nodes try to constantly pin the particles on/in their initial spawn positions and don't let the FiledForce move them. Some of the particles even glitch between two close position indicating that the node and FieldForce compete for the same particle. Any advice ? (R23) test.c4d

I think the openness of Blender is what drives today's CGI advancements. All universities with fields that involve CG have their hands on it. They tinker with it's code and implement all kinds of theories and experimental algorithms on top of it's core. The reason it gets improved fast is because the community that develops it is bigger than any company. Students, professors and scientists contribute to it constantly.

That's weird 🤔, I didn't know they did that. Maybe I overflowed them with suggestions last time. 😆 Could be for the same reason they put this on their support page... Let's hope that all this has only to do with the pandemic and will soon revert to a previous state. 🖖

Apart from Xparticles, ' Marvelous Designer, Substance Painter, Zbrush and Rizom UV are also being used by non C4D users like Maya, Blender, 3DsMAX, Houdini, Lightwave 3D, Daz Studio, iClone, Unity, UE etc. There is no "one DCC to rule them all". And all those names do not belong to plugins. They are stand-alone independent applications that some of them have developed bridges with C4D (and other DCCs) for faster exchange of data. Maya 1998, Blender 1994 , 3DsMAX 1996, Houdini 1996, Lightwave 3D 1990, Daz Studio 2005, UE 1998. Most of them are more than 20 years old. Users of those applications also complain about those products. They complain about the UI/UX of blender, for the crappy 3DsMAX workflow, for Lightwave 3D being dead, for Daz Studio having an exploiting online market, Houdini having a steep learning curve etc... And they should. Why shout out what they are planning ? So others can steal their ideas and try to develop them faster ? What a company is up to is no-ones else's business. This is an oxymoron. What are the bare minimum set of features if the creative idea has high standards ? The bare minimum set of features exist since version 1. Art, like Science, was always limited by the availability of tools. And being either 2021 or 1989 or 2051 does not justify any personal expectations. You can have the latest ArtRage version and still not be able to paint a Bob Ross painting. That man had the bare minimum set of features to create captivating landscapes in a 20' episode. You could have Gaia, WorldMachine, Vue, SpeedTree and Forester and still not achieve what you have in mind. There were a ton of things I thought were impossible with C4D but saw people overcome problems using their ingenuity. In 2021 we don't have artists with the same sense the world had in 1800's. Now the artist is also a technician. He has to have a deeper knowledge of the tools he uses in order to use them in their full potential. Hacking a tool to use it in an unusual way is also part of the artist's creative spirit. Correct.

Would you like to share what kind of improvements regarding Dynamics you'd like to see ?

All my assumptions are based on observations. My conclusions are (I think) safe based on actions Maxon already took on the timescale from 2008 till now. We, as users, will never know how long it took for Maxon's developers to study a topic, model it to fit inside the C4D environment and finally implement it. Dynamics and Particles were all introduced as modules in a certain release (I think R8, I missed the news on R7 so correct me if I'm wrong). Cloth dynamics (I think) came with R9. R9 was introduced with a bunch of modules which for me is a surprise. They must have been preparing all these features for years to be ready for our hands. So time of development is one factor. The other factor is "where is this ship heading to ?". So each module had its own development team, people that had accumulated a certain knowledge on a very specific topic. These teams kept optimizing the already existing foundations up to the time the Modules strategy stopped existing (I think R14 or R16) with the introduction of Production Specific Packs. I think that this change was a reflection of what was happening all over that time (economic turbulence, rise of other competitive DCCs, people getting in and out of the company etc). I think that was the time when Maxon decided they had reached a safe point of feature development where they could now focus on more technical things like keeping up with hardware advancements and rewriting their Core which kept them back from improving other things. The last couple of years aren't the best years to be around... The pandemic was a big crash, not only for Maxon, but some where hurt big and others not. I think the pandemic is well reflected on the S24 - R25. C4D had lost the speed on keeping up with things years before due to factors unknown to us (I think it was key-employees). It seems the current "captain" of the ship is trying to take a place in the top 3 using shortcuts and safe decisions. The acquisition of other assets starting with Redshift is a safe shortcut since ProRender and Material Nodes didn't seem to have the anticipated success. And instead of investing more time and money on trying to fit new features for different Rendering Frameworks (Standard, Physical, Pro, Nodes) they decided to buy a new one. (Let's admit it, Rendering had suffered a lot in C4D, from PyroClusters, to Vector Parallax to Physical Sky and lastly Material Nodes, some deprecated some not working and some not having an audience). If you take a good look at the 2 Minutes Papers channel you will see vastly different approaches on solving liquid simulations. Some use only surface solvers, others adaptive sphere packing, others sparse matrices, others adaptive resolutions... some are good for large areas like oceans, others for medium scales like interactions between objects on the size of boats to toys and other for tiny scales like water droplet collisions and bubble surface tension. It's very risky to just pick one model over the other and invest time and money to it while there are 10 more to be announced the next 2 years. I think that's what happened back in R9, they gathered whatever paper was available at that time (they weren't many) and chose what seemed best for most user cases with as little computational burden possible. I think what kept Particles development behind was an adequate mesher. I don't know if C4Ds particle system is a FLIP based one (and if FLIP is opensource) but as it is it's fine. What is lacking is a descent mesher and MetaBalls are not adequate. To be honest back in 2009-2012 Maxon didn't even care showcasing projects involving only C4D on their promotional videos. RealFlow, Houdini and 3rd party renderers were all over the promotion scenes. Now we see AE and Houdini all the time in Maxon-hosted 3D Motion shows. There is no more aggressiveness over the CGI pie. Everyone got their portion of it and are happy with it. Now it's the era of collaboration. Plugins for importing/exporting between apps (AE/Houdini/ZBrush/ArchCAD) are more important because at the end of the day what really matters is the result. If a user works on multiple DCCs it means he knows the advantages and disadvantages of each and uses each of them only for their advantages throwing his project from one to the other like a ping-pong ball and as for the cost... the cost is proportional to the needs of the client. If the client wants AAA results with fire, smoke, crowd simulations etc the artist has to bill appropriately to cover his expenses to buy a bunch of licences in order to achieve that result. (A small deviation here - starting as a freelancer now is hard due to costs but it wasn't the same a decade ago, less demanding marketing, cheaper software and other factors made a more friendly environment, you could start with little and climb your way up having to afford only the upgrade costs). So, my bet is on AI because it's something new that others competitors are on the same level as C4D. It's better to try to win a new race rather one you've already lost. Yes, it does need "fresh blood" among the crew but the field of A.I. in graphics is thriving in the academic ecosystem right now. In the early days of AI few academics involved around it, now there is an AI course in every undergraduate IT program. On the other hand all other simulation areas are hard post-graduate level programs (if not doctorate). Nowadays (I think) it's easier to find AI specialists to work for you than finding people specializing in the Navier-stokes Equations.

My thought process involves a step where I have to make the devils advocate in most of my desires. In this case I believe there will be no Simulation enhancements to any areas (Cloth, Dynamics, Particles) FYI : When I say "Simulation enhancements" I don't mean extra tools like a new force field or an extra tag like a "Tension Vertex Map" but an integral enhancement at the core of the processing algorithm. For the past 5 or so years any advance to these fields wasn't done by adding a little extra to existing theoretical models and algorithms but with completely new ones. And believe it or not A.I. now is involved everywhere. The good old days of analytical computation are over. So every time we expect for a better Simulator we actually expect for a ground-up re-write of a complete system still compatible with every other part of C4D. It's like chopping down the tree trunk and expect the branches to float in place. Cloth simulations - There is Marvelous Designer and CLO3D that are both top of their class because they are specialized in cloth simulations and nothing else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mrdkyv0yXxY Dynamics - Most 3D apps have a dynamics simulator. Especially game engines. This field forks to the areas of Rigid body dynamics, Plastic Collisions, Soft body dynamics, and Celestial motion. Of these the first three are of CGI interest with second the third being the most interesting to the scientific community with advances on better, faster and more accurate simulations involving collision deformations, stretch & tear and fracture. I think Houdini is the top rival in this area. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxzGraohijU Particles - This area involves Grain, Liquids and Gas interactions. All of these topics involve heavy math and intensive computations. On top of that each matter state involves a different mathematical approach the simulation. From 2010 to 2017 we where trying to perfect each area individually. Then more broad methods where used to include all three matter states in one simulation paradigm for solving interactions like fluids with sand and wind with liquids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54YvCE8_7lM&list=PLujxSBD-JXgnnd16wIjedAcvfQcLw0IJI For simulations like these in CGI top contenders are Houdini, RealFlow, FumeFX and Xparticles. There is no reason for MAXON to compete with any of the above applications by integrating new simulation systems in C4D when they are already available. The only way to do this is to pioneer in the field and as I see it the only way is to employ the A.I. benefits, but assembling the right development team with the expertise on all those fields is too hard. To justify my money on A.I. have a look at these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMCYRCCqR5Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7bEUB8aLvM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1F-WnarzkX8 Particle dynamics development is a special issue for Maxon since Xparticles somehow promotes C4D... And since there is no consent on either part acquiring the other the status will remain as is indefinitely. I think that Maxon in an attempt to please the majority of users wanting more particle power acquired Trapcode Particular the only downside is that this is not a stand-alone application but a AE plugin. The same could be true for Forger as the built-in sculpting system wasn't a worthy opponent of ZBrush. I think that in an attempt to please as many users (with different needs) as possible Maxon spread thin and subsequent versions of C4D got a bit "clumsy". For the same reason (I think) there will be no enhancements or development to these topics inside C4D: Rendering (they have the Redshift team working on it) Volumetric materials (same reason) Shaders (same reason) 3D Fractals (Arnold and Octane have done this already and still a rendering thing and not compatible to the existing model of C4D) MaterialX (too soon for development) Compositing (they have Red Giant and Magic Bullet) In my opinion Maxon did well abandoning particle simulations and Post Effects in favor for Trapcode and other AE solutions since the common development pipeline for VFX involves mostly "faking" these in 2D/2.5D compositing environments. It indeed does hurt me because I'm neither a fan of AE or ever used it but I understand that there will never be an All-in-One application and if it does, it won't be C4D. The only feature now competing with Houdini and Blender is the procedural modeling with Nodes. Other areas of improvement include enhancements of already existing tools and UI/UX that goes hand-in-hand with all others but the bigger piece of the pie goes to the Nodes development. One more thing, that I believe, can make C4D stand-out like it did with the introduction of Fields is the enhancement of Vertex Weight Maps in all areas. I've already sent them a lot of suggestions on that matter we only have to wait if the team will evaluate them worthy of implementation.

I never had the pleasure trying rBool. By the small preview I expect it only works with spheres though. RayTracing a pure sphere was always easy because it has nothing to do with polygons. I guess boolean operations with parametric objects (purely mathematically defined and not as polygon groups) is also easy. Recently a new method for modeling in a similar way was introduced called Signed Distance Fields but we are far from using it in modern 3D applications.

Answering my own questions here ... https://player.vimeo.com/video/643604501 The Geodesic Weight MeshOp allows you to create a vertex map based on a mesh and a set of input points defined in an array. Through the use of locators and the Geodesic map, you can adjust the intensity of operations applied to a mesh based on the size, distance, and position of the locators. Curve Winding Aligner MeshOp Tools like Curve Fill streamline creation of geometry. However, if a curve is inside of another curve, the two curves need to have related directions to fill the shape properly. The Curve Winding Aligner automates this process, ensuring that artists get the result they want without having to troubleshoot a scene.

Unity is to acquire six-time Oscar-winning VFX firm Weta Digital for $1.625 billion, including its engineering team, proprietary software, and in-house asset library. The firm intends to “put these world-class, exclusive VFX tools into the hands of millions of creators and artists around the world”, - Like if the Average Joe has the means to use those tools.... Find out more here